QuirkyTech-nologies

Instructional Need: "My students have been reading and learning standards based skills for nonfiction text. We've used many different types of nonfiction text along with a number of close reading strategies which have fostered rich conversations among the students. I'd like to continue to build on their interest and help them to maintain the skills they've learned. What resources are available that will provide my students with texts that cover a variety of topics and will allow me to continually monitor and assess their skills?"

Solution: Not only will our students need to deal with nonfiction texts of all types throughout their school careers but, exposure to this type of text supports building background knowledge. In his book, "Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement", Robert Marzano points out that research tells us that "what students already know about the content is one of the strongest indicators of how well they will learn new information relative to the content."

Newsela is a free resource that provides students with authentic nonfiction texts from real world publications. These texts can provide a source for continuing development of reading skills as well as build background knowledge around a variety of topics.

Instructional Need:"I've been working on purposefully planning for the type of questions that promote deeper thinking and learning for my students. I'm seeing some good results but not every student is participating in the conversation and I can see through my assessments how that's affecting the learning. How can I encourage more students to contribute so I can get a better sense of their understanding of the content?"

Solution:﻿Keeping students engaged in learning and helping them feel comfortable with contributing to the conversation in a classroom is always a challenge. Recently, I came across an app that I think is going to take student engagement and participation to a whole new level.